There is something magical with the feeling of floating in the air. Most people will have this feeling only in a dream. For some it turns out a nightmare, for others a wish to pursue once awake. I have always wanted to make a trip in a hot air balloon. The feeling of quietness and weightlessness is something to experience for sure. The closest I ever got to this feeling was when I went diving in the Mediterranean.

But that was a very long time ago. A few days ago I finally got a reservation on a hot air balloon. This year seems to have been very bad for flights for the pilots. Too much rain and wind, so when finally the flight was not cancelled, up I went!

Provincial Parks tend to take up a lot of space, it seems. At least here in Manitoba. Some of those parks take up the entire surface of my original country of The Netherlands. And we still call them just Provincial Parks. Last winter I went to a small park, only a few acres big. In Seven Sisters Falls.

The Whitemouth Provincial Park is tucked away behind a lot of trees and a fairly long unpaved road. Last winter I went there with a friend in his truck and we had no issues getting there. Later I tried it again with my own car, also a 4x4 but didn’t make it through the 12 inches of freshly fallen snow.

In fact, it is not a bog, it’s a fen. A few weeks ago I went to the Brokenhead Wetlands, unknowing that it was not even open to the public yet. I was not trespassing, simply the official opening hadn’t happened yet. The final preparations did call for a closure of the territory two weeks after my visit. The Brokenhead Wetlands officially opened on June 22, 2016.

The Wetlands were pretty impassable until the boardwalk was constructed. Now you can walk around without getting your feet wet. At first it looks like a normal Cedar Bog, but then…

Men that separate the wheat from the chaff. The term can be explained in multiple fashions, but I’ll stick with the original meaning. Manitoba has a big history in grain and processing grain. Many towns have sprouted in the middle of nowhere to begin growing and processing grain.

In the last few decades, however, that activity has shifted towards more efficient ways processing the grain. As a result, many towns have become ghost towns and a lot of material has been abandoned and left to decay. Unless…

The Canadian Snowbirds. The elite of the fighter pilots. The ones that are allowed to do acrobatics in their planes where normal jet fighters are supposed to go by the book. When we speak of the Snowbirds, everyone is in awe. People watching a show with the Snowbirds invariably will fire up the Top Gun theme in their cars.

Twenty years after the movie it is still going strong as a theme… The Canadian Forces Snowbirds (431 Air Demonstration Squadron) is a Canadian icon comprised of serving members of the Canadian Armed Forces.

“You have your head in the clouds!”, my mother used to say. As a young boy I was a dreamer. I was also the tallest kid in the classroom, so the expression was somewhat lost on me at the time. I thought my mother was just talking about my superior height, not about my daydreaming. So I continued to dream. Dreaming I was a pilot, dreaming about living in the wilderness, dreaming about… you name it.

Until someone told me when I started wearing glasses at the age of 8 that being a pilot was out of reach. So I dreamt of other things. Funny enough, I never dreamt of becoming a programmer or IT specialist. Probably because that didn’t even exist fifty years ago. Last weekend I had my head in the clouds again.

Writing about and shooting birds does not bore me. Most of the time. But sometimes I need to show something else, just to remain “interesting”. So, instead of simply giving an account of my May Long Weekend, I thought it might be a change to write about a different trip.

This time it was a trip to the Brokenhead Bog, a little north of Winnipeg. Recently they have constructed a nice boardwalk so you can enjoy the bog/marsh keeping your feet dry.

It is for most Canadians THE weekend of the year. It kicks off summer season, opens all summer activities, the “cottages at the lake” and much more. This year, May long Weekend didn’t disappoint with the weather either. Two great days and one day starting off a bit great and ending great as well. I always thought that a long weekend in Canada always had at least one rainy or snowy day in it…

This year, I had the possibilities to go out every day and thus recharge my batteries a little bit. As a result, the store of pictures of birds and nature has been replenished somewhat.